The recent explosion of progress in AI offers exciting new opportunities for neuroscience on many fronts. In discussing deep RL, we have focused on one particularly novel area of AI research which, in our view, has particularly rich implications for neuroscience, most of which have not yet been deeply explored. As we have described, deep RL provides an agent-based framework for studying the way that reward shapes representation, and how representation in turn shapes learning and decision making, two issues which together span a large swath of what is most central to neuroscience. We look forward to an increasing engagement in neuroscience with deep RL research. As this occurs there is also a further opportunity. We have focused on how deep RL can help neuroscience, but as should be clear from much of what we have written, deep RL is a work in progress. In this sense there is also the opportunity for neuroscience research to influence deep RL, continuing the synergistic ‘virtuous circle’ that has connected neuroscience and AI for decades [1]}.
